Sun Dance

The Sun Dance is an annual, multi day communal ceremony held by many Plains nations of North America, generally timed around the summer solstice, and it stands among the most important surviving religious ceremonies of the Plains cultural area, involving extended fasting, prayer, drumming and singing by the whole gathered community around pledged dancers who undertake the ceremony's most demanding commitments, in some nations' forms including physical sacrifice, as an act of prayer, thanksgiving and renewal for the people as a whole rather than for the dancers alone. It is a closed ceremony belonging to living Indigenous religious traditions, held by Lakota, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Blackfoot, Crow, Kiowa and other Plains nations each according to their own particular protocols, and its specific ritual content, songs and internal procedure are not published here or generalised for outside audiences, in keeping with the tribes' own stated position, articulated forcefully by Lakota spiritual leaders in formal declarations opposing the commercial and unauthorised use of Lakota ceremony by outsiders. What can be said from the outside is the ceremony's broad shape and significance, drawn from published ethnography and legal history, and its documented history of suppression and recovery in the United States and Canada, not a description of ritual procedure, which belongs to the nations that hold it.

United States federal Indian policy explicitly targeted the Sun Dance for suppression from the late nineteenth century, with the Bureau of Indian Affairs formally prohibiting it and other Indigenous ceremonies as part of a broader assimilationist campaign that also drove children into boarding schools and criminalised a wide range of Native American religious practice, a documented history of religious persecution that continued in various forms into the twentieth century even as many nations kept the ceremony alive in secret or in reduced and adapted form despite the ban.

The American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978, and its 1994 amendments extending specific protections to traditional religious use of otherwise controlled substances, marked a major legal turning point in the United States, formally affirming Native American religious practice, including ceremonies like the Sun Dance, as protected rather than prohibited, though tribal nations and scholars of Native American law have noted that legal protection did not by itself repair the deep intergenerational disruption the earlier suppression caused. The ceremony today is practised openly again among the nations that hold it, generally on reservation land or other tribally controlled sites and, consistent with its closed status, typically not open to uninvited outside observers, a continuation of a ceremony that survived a documented and sustained campaign to end it rather than a simple, unbroken tradition unaffected by that history.

Sources Documents of United States Indian PolicyFrancis Paul Prucha (ed.) with American Indian Religious Freedom Act Amendments of 1994 (Pub. L. 103-344)United States Congress